Masters of the Trading Game Read online

appeared. There were several other kinds of groups living in the city besides the one that had the group of men who had the many former wives and who all formed a strong mutual support group.

  He focused upon a young couple who had moved into town, the man having been lured here by a high paying nice job. He sent the micro-vehicles to be clustered around the areas where their new home had been, around the man on his job, and the couple's shopping. Things had at first looked fine. Then they registered to receive an offspring permit; immediately there were odd changes. The micro-vehicles discovered that the woman had been surrounded during shopping by the most handsome men among the sales staff, smiling and being helpful. Meanwhile, her husband was being assaulted by nearly invisible electric sparks shot by devices carried by the leaders of the area, and also were mounted in vehicles and at doorways, all quite hidden. The man, increasingly unfocused, gave up trying to figure out what had pricked him out of nowhere over and over again, and his body chemistry became altered, befuddling his thinking increasingly. When he came home, his wife wondered why he was being so dopey and no longer coping with life; he began to tell her that his boss on the job was not giving him a good job review. She liked the town there, the handsome salesmen and the smiling and very helpful women ever busy around when something was needed, who seemed ever ready to give her whatever she needed even before she needed it.

  Finally her husband came home one day and said he had lost his job; he could not figure out what was going on, felt sleepy much of the time. There was a divorce clinic in town so she went there, found it was a quick and easy process, and soon she was a free woman, the law forcing her former husband to support her. Meanwhile, her former husband could find little work, and that was of low skill, and he was ever sleepy and now was being assaulted by pre-audible-sonics which were used in stores to direct staff, but now directed mysteriously to the now loner male. Eventually he could not endure it all, wifeless and alone, friendless, and he left town. Thus, another female was added to the territory's population, not balanced by a male's equal presence. Eventually the woman got involved in the town's group meetings and support systems, leading to occasional contact with the males who were former husbands of lots of the women. Soon she was to be added to the list of the women who were re-married, reproduced, divorced again, and living just fine with children, with occasional visits by her former reproducing mate. So that was the phenomenon.

  Comparing with the other three territories he had observed, he found that they too had the same subgroup among them, quietly gathering other females from among the other kinds of groups nearby. Yet the virtual-polygamist-ruled group had not yet completely taken over the other three territories.

  The library yielded lots of this kind of activity in history; it was a pattern where a small group of males somehow figured out how to deprive lots of other males of women, and thus had large groups of females by which to reproduce, and all their sons were now bonded by genetics, a genetic mark that caused them to unite against the world cleverly. Unmated, the genetics of the other males faded out of existence. The more subtle levels of living systems, sometimes called spiritual equivalents, were involved, the groups which were growing under the united membership requiring only male dependancy of their unique male ancestry, a subtle psychic bonding and monitoring system that mystified non-member males and eventually caused their downfall, freeing their women to be acquired by the in-group. Such systems had happened several times around the world and throughout history, but eventually all the other groups had become amalgamated to a large extent into the larger society of which they were part. But the current virtual-polygamist-mutual-support-society in this territory was of a fairly new such group; wars were not being fought to dispose of neighbor males and free their women to be taken; but rather this time it was an insidious war against the individual males of the larger group, all done mysteriously to the non-in-group males. With the available females being taken in by the very supportive expanding group fathered by the founding fathers of the group, the other males of the original 50-50 gender ratio at birth, deprived of mating and progeny, faded away early in life. Laws enforcing monogamy were being skirted thereby; and anyway the law enforcers were among the reproductively privileged males, and no way were they going to disrupt a good thing for themselves.

  So the micro-vehicles had found the raw data; and his suitcase data processor and communicator had sifted out the patterns. Yet it did not seem to be the cause of the attack on himself; was it that they were afraid he would observe the phenomenon and spread the word? Not likely; they knew his mission was to enhance trade between planets and did not care who it was with whom they traded. More data was needed.

  He expanded his library searches to those of archives of the larger territory, even of the world, randomizing the searches so as to not leave too obvious a pattern for any who might wonder at the curiosity. Billions of news articles and writings of all kinds in the public system were evaluated, and a shadow process began to be sifted out, something that had been going on a long time, and rapidly getting more powerful, yet still not noticed by those squarely in the obvious path of ruin for the chosen target ones. It was one of the groups of the same leadership which had taken over this town, one woman at a time, by disposing of one man at a time via social crushing, mysterious estrangements. The shadow pattern took on probabilities way above random, that showed that the national and international spread of this group had expanded enormously under the cover of being just another group. They were very supportive of each other, whereas most of the rest of this world's men were intensely rivalrous to each other, each man an island, slowly drowning as the social water rose around him, ever shrinking his territory to nothing. The normal ratio of women they would have had as mates, were easily lured into the spreading group, much as within this current city he was observing. Yet it was a big nation, and a bigger world. In the past, this group had become too noticed by the men who had been deprived of mates, and in one case were declared unwanted and so they had moved elsewhere; yet their great mutual support system among the females had supplied abundance and good living, unhindered by taboos against the psychic side of spirituality common elsewhere; no part of life was taboo and therefore all were resources, thus maximum success was theirs. The only losers were all men who were not genetically related to the founding fathers of the seminal group a hundred years before. Yet now their wealth and quiet power had gotten an incompetent greedy government into power, which had led the country into financial ruin by expending resources fighting shadows in far lands and causing havoc there, generating growing world hostility.

  Meanwhile, the spread word was that the whole world was overpopulated, so everybody stop having so many children; and this was being followed willingly or unwillingly by increasing numbers of people, many threatened by new diseases and strange toxins and disruptive pseudo-hormones. All except a couple of groups, that is; and the group who were acquiring women by the truckload like in this town, were reproducing as fast as possible. It was clear by drawing the projection curves, that this group would soon have overrun the whole country; and they were making efforts for formal leadership of the country, even though they had long had virtual control of the country through their vast network of normally peaceable mind-their-own-business people who only rarely responded to requirements to do an occasional dirty-work of the eldership, to trigger some event in un-obvious fashion.

  OK, he now had the larger shadow social pattern, which clearly would coalesce most anywhere he tested; it was a deliberately guided subtle takeover of the nation. It would be them whom the Federation would trade with, so what? The Federation does not care who they traded with. So why had there been an attempt to terminate his research as ambassador here? It had been clearly an unemotional assault. They just pulled the plug on him, then went on to make sure nothing remained to show it.

  So he provided his data set of the social evaluation via subspace communication to the home planet, then recommended that a perfunctory
search be made for his crashed aircraft and his remains, making an official end to the investigation of his mysterious disappearance ... and by the way, happening to make a pit-stop here at his hideaway hole in the twilight so he could jump in and head back with them to home, along with his equipment. These people were too quietly ruthless to be trusted with knowledge of such advanced technology as he had here. His job was done here; soon he would be in the comforting embrace of his wife. Criteria for the trade negotiations were about to change on this planet, but now they knew what the new social system would be, and they would be ready to make profitable trade with it. No problem.

  He was getting oddly sleepy now, and as he dozed off he vaguely remembered the man who had come to do an ordinary job in this town, but it had cost him his wife; he had lost all to the hidden alpha-male masters of the business game. He was getting ... so ... oddly ... sleepy ....

  (Note: I originally posted this story on my